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Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

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Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#151

Post by OrgNet »

mattnewton wrote: post #70
danShumway wrote: post #37

Most likely a user-agent check to ensure compatibility. I don't assume any ill intent. That being said, what does annoy me is that we've known for years that feature detection is preferable to user-agent detection, and I would kind of expect one of the biggest web development companies in the world to be following best practices. This isn't my local pizza shop, Google engineers should know better. Have they already f…

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on YouTube, also speaking just personally. This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript…

> This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment.

Google doesn't really care that much about latency, they only care about it so that they can hide from you that they are loading all that extra javascript that spies on you.

And btw, watching videos is not really latency sensitive, it is more bandwidth sensitive... (I don't really care if I have to wait 1 second to start watching a 2hour video, but I will be mad if it is buffering every 30 seconds)

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#153

Post by jrochkind1 »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #138
jrochkind1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the GP said "I work at Google but not on YouTube", and was speaking of Google and the sorts of technical challenges Google has in general, not any specific product. So danShumway pointed out that in one flagship product, they didn't seem worried about latency, so it could be argued that avoiding user-agent detection is more important than latency on youtube too. But yeah, there are lots of competing things go…

> Because the GP said "I work at Google but not on YouTube" That was a disclosure, not a credential. My reading of it was that GP was speaking of the tradeoffs in their capacity as an engineer, and said they are a Googler for fair disclosure and nothing more.

They weren't explicit that they weren't talking about YouTube specifically but generally about the kinds of challenges and tradeoffs Google faces, so that's why the reply was also talking about products other than YouTube in the context of the kinds of tradeoffs Google has been known to make. That's what it has to do with what original GP said, to answer your question directly.

Anyway, I found both original GP and the reply useful, and do not find this exchange to be, so I'll stop!

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#154

Post by runarberg »

mattnewton wrote: post #70
danShumway wrote: post #37

Most likely a user-agent check to ensure compatibility. I don't assume any ill intent. That being said, what does annoy me is that we've known for years that feature detection is preferable to user-agent detection, and I would kind of expect one of the biggest web development companies in the world to be following best practices. This isn't my local pizza shop, Google engineers should know better. Have they already f…

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on YouTube, also speaking just personally. This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript…

> Feature detection stops being better when a) your supported browser list stretches into the early 2000s around the world and b) you are in a latency sensitive environment where it is unacceptable to degrade performance of the latest browsers.

So whitelist “safe browsers” with server side user-agent sniffing and send the rest a bigger bundle with feature detection. There is no reason not to serve users of modern browsers the latest feature just because you fail to detect them in on the server.

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#156

Post by filoleg »

mattnewton wrote: post #70
danShumway wrote: post #37

Most likely a user-agent check to ensure compatibility. I don't assume any ill intent. That being said, what does annoy me is that we've known for years that feature detection is preferable to user-agent detection, and I would kind of expect one of the biggest web development companies in the world to be following best practices. This isn't my local pizza shop, Google engineers should know better. Have they already f…

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on YouTube, also speaking just personally. This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript…

>This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript once we know they will be able to handle it.

It might sound naive, but why would fetching more JS later degrade the experience? I thought that bundle splitting was an accepted good practice. For example, you have your main core bundle, then some polyfill bundles (that get downloaded if the feature detector says it is needed), and then you have separate bundles for obscure and not-that-often-used stuff that gets loaded on demand. It is a genuine question, and I would like to learn what's wrong with this approach, because that's something I work with on a day-to-day basis.

P.S. Please don't go into the negatives of bundle splitting every little thing into its own bundle that gets loaded on demand, I am aware of downsides of that. I was talking about more sensible approach to bundle splitting (which I described in a somewhat oversimplified way).

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#157

Post by lern_too_spel »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #52
bovermyer wrote: post #2

I'm going to assume this is accidental, not intentional.

This is what Google is counting on, former Mozilla exec has a strong take on Google's constant use of "Oops": https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... To me, this story (and the previous ones about all of the other Google apps breaking for new Edge, despite being Chromium, and not an issue for almost any other company on the web), is going to show Microsoft what happens when they get in bed wit…

How would continuing to use their own browser engine have helped them in any way? You imply that other options would have better outcomes for Microsoft without having thought through what they would be.

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#158

Post by runarberg »

pluma wrote: post #30

Having a whitelist of tested browsers you officially support is understandable. Having a blacklist of tested browsers you know to be so incompatible that the site is unusable for them would be even better. But the optimal course would be that if a browser is not on your whitelist, you show a warning but allow the user to decide to give it a try nevertheless and have an option to go back to the degraded but more compa…

The currently agreed best practice is to detect if a feature is supported and gracefully degrade if it isn’t. Do this on a feature by feature bases so that users gradually get better experience as they upgrade their browsers.

However, as other comments have pointed out, feature detection is not always optimal—or even possible—so a whitelist is sometimes needed. This is where YouTube fails. It wrongly doesn’t add the new Chromium based Edge browser to their whitelist. And even then the site doesn’t progressively enhance as it detects supported features.

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#159

Post by rchaud »

RandomGuyDTB wrote: post #139
rchaud wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On OSX, Firefox and Google Drive work fine, but Gmail is a whole other kettle of fish. I don't know what UI change they implemented last year or so, but it is nearly unusable on Firefox, from absurdly long load times, to a 2-3 second wait for contextual options to appear when you right click. Switched to ProtonMail's free tier and will gradually migrate everything there aside from newsletter and software beta signups…

You can change email forwarding in Gmail to forward everything to the Protonmail. That's how I initially transferred. A year and still changing email addresses, I have a ton of accounts to go.

The free tier has 500MB storage, so this gives me a chance to think about what's worth migrating and what's not.

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#160

Post by mattnewton »

filoleg wrote: post #156
mattnewton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on YouTube, also speaking just personally. This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript…

>This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript once we know they will be able to handle it. It might sound naive, but why woul…

>> It might sound naive, but why would fetching more JS later degrade the experience? I thought that bundle splitting was an accepted good practice. For example, you have your main core bundle, then some polyfill bundles (that get downloaded if the feature detector says it is needed), and then you have separate bundles for obscure and not-that-often-used stuff that gets loaded on demand. It is a genuine question, and I would like to learn what's wrong with this approach, because that's something I work with on a day-to-day basis.

There isn’t anything wrong with this approach at all - keep doing this! It just doesn’t solve the initial load problem. This kind of code splitting _also_ happens on all google properties I am aware of. The problem here is what gets into the initial bundle, and is it enough to make the page useful. If the initial bundle isn’t enough to make the page useful, then the user has to wait for two requests to complete serially before they can perform their task.

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